Just put together a list

Lists, we editors are told at seminars by magazine experts, are the thing. You see ’em on any newsstand: 10 Great Meals in 30 Minutes. 20 Exotic Vacation Spots. 12 Ways to Hold Your Man.

I personally hate magazine lists; they’re just excuses to put together an article with not much effort.

Which, with today’s heat index of 107 warranting as little effort as possible, is why I offer herewith some of my lists:

10 things I’ve never liked in any way, form, or fashion: 1. Celery. 2. Olives (but like olive oil). 3. Turnips (but like turnip greens). 4. Avocados/guacamole. 5. Squash/zucchini/cucumbers. 6. Caviar (it’s all fish eggs to me, and smelly at that). 7. Disco. 8. The Beach Boys (musical equivalent of scraping fingernails on a blackboard). 9. Diet sodas of any kind (all taste like chemicals). 10. Bread pudding (yeah, I know it’s de rigueur in the South, but you can have my share).

7 things I’ve tried once and never again: 1. Escargots (they’re snails any way you disguise them, and as much as I’ve battled them in the yard, I don’t want to eat them — although I did, many years ago, in a fancy restaurant atop a ritzy hotel in Tehran, just to say I’d done it; the garlic wine sauce was fantastic, the snails were like chewing on pieces of rubber). 2. Mountain oysters (sorta like oversize, round chicken gizzards). 3. Fried rattlesnake (tastes like chicken — but if a chicken bites you, it won’t kill you). 4. Fried alligator (tastes like chicken, and while I’d rather eat the alligator than vice-versa, why bother?). 5. Conch fritters/conch chowder (the “in” things in Key West and the Islands — more rubber). 6. French fried grasshoppers/chocolate-covered baby bumblebees/other idiotic things that people ate to gross out other people back in the ’60s. 7. Motorcycles (I once risked my life riding with a less-than-sober biker and vowed if I ever got off alive, I’d never straddle another, and I haven’t).

4 things I like that most people don’t: 1. Okra, fried or boiled (what would gumbo be without it?). 2. Spinach (gimme my Popeye medal). 3. Fried green tomatoes. 4. Faulkner’s writings (an absolute master of the use of language).

3 things I’ve never tried, even though I had the opportunity, because I just knew I wouldn’t like it: 1. Chitterlings (the cooking smell is turn-off enough). 2. Squid pizza (in Venice a friend ordered it, and it was black … and ghastly-looking). 3. Baked possum (just an overgrown rat).

3 things I hope never to do again: 1. Try to peel an apple with a plastic knife from a KFC “utensils” packet. 2. Sneeze with a mouthful of food. 3. Watch any TV show with “Amazing” or “Great” in the title, or “Reality” in the description.